This article contains mainly philosophical reflections mixed with some historical information on the development of metallurgy and metallography. The author reviews the development of knowledge about metal structure and guesses that the nature of science may be changing, so that the past approaches to structure by physicists and crystallographers may not lead to dramatic advances in the future. Historical information presented concerns the description of microstructural heterogeneity in steel leading eventually to the identification of carbon, along with specific observations on the development of Japanese metallurgy. The latter involved a deep, intuitive understanding rather than an analytical approach to the material. Today, new models which are explicitly hierarchical are needed. Judging from the past, the clarifying ideas that will provide the needed keys to the understanding of complex systems in general will come from a man who is basically a philosopher but who is worrying about a problem presented by his intuition about real matter. The attributes of artist, artisan, and scientist will all be involved.